Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  They steered me out of the main room into a dark diagonal gash that led to a side passage, half-natural and half-hewn-out, with the most dangerous spicules ground away to a level just above our heads and an irregular floor sloping up at thirty degrees. Before we were quite in the dark zone, they stopped in the middle of a sort of antechamber and called back the dressers. We waited. The dressers showed up and cleaned me up again. At least you don’t have to do your own toilette around here. When I was at school I went out for a while with this woman from India—in fact, she was once Miss India, although I don’t expect you to believe that—and I was surprised to find out that she’d never washed her own hair, not once, in her entire life. It turned out that wasn’t unusual in India, where the maids have maids, and they have maids. So around here, even a jailbird like me got a stylist. When that was done they stood me up and we went on into total blackness, feeling our way along a ridged path cut into the limestone floor. We spiraled deeper into the mountain. There was less ventilation here and less-healthful smells. My feet felt a floor leveled with clay and the passage widened into an L-shaped room with a dim fuzz of daylight. In here the walls had been cut into shelves and packed with unornamented jars and, above them, ranks of little clay ancestors looking squalid and ad hoc. One shelf held a row of these sort of pornographic wood statues of gargoyley old men groping young women. Each was kitschier than the last. Well, so they have lousy taste here too. Not everything from the past is great. One just tends to think it is because it’s mainly the good stuff that gets saved, and the only time you do see how most of everything from the past was junk is when everything happens to get preserved all at once, like in Pompeii. Now, that was a tacky town. The Coconut Grove of ancient—

  Whoops. They ducked-and-pulled me through a deerskin flap I hadn’t seen and steered me thirty steps up a torchlit ramp to another flap, this one scaled with shell beads. There was an older Harpy blood sitting in front of it, and he and the captain of the porters exchanged a nonsense code greeting. The old blood stood up, lifting the flap, and flattened himself against the wall to let us pass. There was a cardamomy smell of wild allspice. Hun Xoc and I crouched into a small tertiary chamber the size of a refrigerator and then through another little door into a bubble-shaped room about the size of a one-car garage. There was no natural light, but there were two rushlights—reeds dipped in tallow—burning at the far end, and instead of the smoke’s filling up the place it practically shot up into a crack in the far wall, caught in a steady cool breeze. Just from the air you could tell it was what spelunkers call a dry room, that is, a room sheltered from rain and above the flow of any running water, with nonporous walls that wouldn’t mold. The far wall was artificial, made of cut blocks, but the side walls had been roughed out of the natural cave, and on our right two gray flowstone stalagmites had been left relatively untrashed. The largest was carved into an old-fashioned half-statue of a Harpy lord. His seating date was still readable as 9 Ahau, 3 Sip on the first day of the eighth b’ak’tun—that is, September 7, 41 AD, 244 days after the assassination of Caligula. There were old covered offering jars around its base, most of them broken. The rest of the library—or maybe I should say records room or genizah—was filled with neat stacks of breadbox-sized chests. Four of them were open and in one I could see a screenfold book half-buried in rock salt.

  Including Hun Xoc and me, there were eight people in the room. 2 Jeweled Skull sat on a cushion at the far side, with his legs wrapped in a quilted cotton blanket. A big guard squatted on his right-hand side, facing down at the floor. He stiffened as we came in but didn’t look up. He was about a head taller than and twice as heavy as anyone else, and he was older than the other guards I’d seen, which maybe meant he was trusted. He wore a light quilted padding on his shoulders and hips, and according to the tattoos on his calves, during his military career he’d offered eight captives to One Harpy. Two people squatted between me and the guard, also on the left side of the room. The first was a thin old man with a dark manta over his shoulders and with his head wrapped up in a kind of veil under a hat, like a pith helmet with mosquito netting. I couldn’t see much of him, but he seemed familiar. There was something odd about his forearms, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Next, closest to me, there was the same monkey-costumed scribe who I’d seen before in the red-feathered room. He had a long, thin paintbrush tied to his index finger, and without looking at us he went on with what he was doing, copying tallies of something onto sheets of dried palm leaf in quick sloppy columns of dots and bars. In fact, the word scribe sounds a little grand and monastic for him. It might be less misleading to call him a combination stenographer and accountant. Or maybe we should just translate his title literally: “remembrancer.”

  Three other men sat against the right-hand wall. 2JS’s grand-uncle 12 Unwinding was closest to me, and then there was 2JS’s great-great-grandfather 40 Weasel, and finally someone else, whose wrappings were too old and crumbly for me to read, sat close to 2JS’s left hand. They were dead, of course, and semimummified—that is, they were basically shrunken heads, probably stuffed with the allspice, sitting on top of bundles of a few key bones, ulnas and fibulas and so on, each on a little platform like an Indian tea table, all in a line on the left wall. Their skulls would be buried somewhere else for safety along with the rest of their bones and favorite wives and whatever. Present but not voting.

  2JS spread his hands apart in a blossoming gesture, the Maya equivalent of a shrug.

  Hun Xoc positioned me on a subordinate’s mat. I turned down my eyes and automatically my right hand moved to my left shoulder. I heard Hun Xoc crouch out behind me. 2JS spoke:

  “Again, take out your worm.”

  What the hell? I wondered. I thought we’d gone through this. By now, I’d caught on to the protocol around here enough to know that if I didn’t have anything to say, I should just shut up. I looked down at the ground. Hell, I thought. He’s still going to kill me. Hell, hell, hell.

  “I knock you the ninth hipball,” he said. It was like saying, “This is your last chance.”

  I looked up.

  “Jed?” I asked. “Get out of there, okay? Or just stifle. Please. Take one for the team.”

  Naturally, there was a pause, and naturally, nothing happened. If the Jed in his head did anything special on hearing me, 2JS didn’t say so.

  “Will he ever listen to you?” 2JS asked finally.

  I said I didn’t know.

  I suggested, delicately, that 2JS might be able to purge himself of me the way he’d had me purged of Chacal.

  “What is the Jed inside you saying?” I asked.

  “He is screaming,” 2JS said.

  I shuddered. Damn. Imagine that poor larval retarded me in there, writhing under the lashes of 2JS’s indomitable will. Wow. That must really suck—

  “I see it but don’t know its names. In me,

  Your life is like a pile of broken pots,”

  he said, for the first time sounding almost uncertain.

  Huh, I thought. Well, at least now we’re talking. I was beginning to learn to trust Chacal’s body’s automatic responses, to worry about the big decisions and otherwise let his body do what it did instinctively. This time it knew the correct way of not responding, and without missing a beat I clicked my tongue and gestured, “As you above me say.” Don’t volunteer information, I thought. The more you tell him, the more expendable you become. Right? He needs you around to help him make sense of the alien mishmash in his head. Not that he couldn’t just torture it all out of you anyway. But maybe he doesn’t really want to torture you. Maybe he isn’t really that bad, and he just got angry because he felt violated. Anybody would have. Right?

  Damn. Now I was feeling irrationally guilty. Or maybe not that irrationally. After all, I was a cocephalic colonialist. Forget it, I thought, don’t start feeling sorry for him. He’d kill you in a second.

  “ You underneath me

  Have cost me a son

  And have ruined our household,”

  he said.


  What? I thought. Son? Oh, right.

  As I think I mentioned, I’d already guessed what had happened, that 2JS’s son had been sacrificed in my place when I spoiled the ceremony on the mul. I didn’t know whether to pretend I didn’t know about it or not, so I asked for more information.

  “I underneath you

  Now beg absolution,

  But I underneath you

  Do not understand

  How I birthed this catastrophe,

  How it unfolded.”

  It was the closest thing to asking a direct question that I could manage, since the language made it almost impossible for an inferior to question a superior. And even this much wasn’t exactly polite. Still, 2JS did answer. He told me—in a formal, accusative way—that two solar years ago he had been asked to give the ruling house, the Ocelots, a gift to commemorate the renaming and reseating of their patriarch, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, as Lord of the Fertilizing Waters and k’alomte’—warlord—of Ix. The gift would either have had to be an absolution of debt—which I gathered he’d been unwilling to do—or one of his own sons, as a proxy to be used in 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s mock autosacrifice. But since 2 Jeweled Skull only had two biological sons, he’d been able to negotiate a compromise: One of his adopted sons—the Harpy House’s hipball champion, Chacal—would throw a high-ceremonial hipball game against 9 Fanged Hummingbird, and then, as the “new hipball,” or the loser, throw himself down off the mul in place of 9 Fanged Hummingbird.

  Then, during the ceremony, when Chacal had spoiled the whole thing by apparently freaking out, 2 Jeweled Skull had had Chacal wrapped up and saved for later—for an “excremental killing,” as he put it—and sent a messenger down to his two primary sons, who had been standing in the Harpy House formation in the plaza at the base of the mul. The elder son, 23 Ash, immediately climbed the stairs. The preparators had quickly painted him in the sacrificial blue, and he dove.

  2 Jeweled Skull paused.

  Damn, I thought. No matter how cold-ass you are, losing a kid’s got to hurt. Here is the firestone and the wood, but where is the sheep for a burnt offering? Do I apologize again? Somehow it didn’t feel right. Instead I said I’d do whatever I could to make up for it.

  He said,

  “You underneath me,”

  Would need to give more than your head,

  More than twenty times twenty tunob’ of pain,

  More than your ancestors’ children.”

  Sorry, I thought.

  He said,

  “Also 8 Steaming’s sons jawboned themselves,

  And 3 Far’s son, the deer hunt’s following sun.”

  What this meant—and it took me a minute to figure it out—was that the three bloods I’d beaten up during the hunt had been so humiliated that each of them had poked a hole through his platysma muscle—just behind his chin—pushed a rope up through the hole, pulled it out through his mouth, tied it, and then tied the rope onto a tree or whatever and fallen backward, yanking off his own jawbone.

  And as if that weren’t bad enough, he added that one Harpy blood had been killed and four were injured in my suicide attempt on the traverse. One of the injured bloods was crippled permanently and was asking to be killed.

  There must have been porters hurt, too, I thought. But of course that wouldn’t matter to him. I started to say that it wasn’t I who’d leapt down the slope but Chacal, but I stopped. 2JS already knew that, and it didn’t matter. I still held responsibility for the event.

  And even all that was nothing, he said, next to what you might call the religiopolitical damage. People were saying that Chacal’s scandalous screwup on the mul had made the Earthtoadess sick and had turned what should have been a little coughing spell into a guts-vomiting seizure. Today, couriers had come in from the coast with accounts of how huge the eruption in San Martín really was. As always, gloomy types were saying it was the end of the world.

  Well, gee, I thought, maybe taking credit for the eruption in my speech on the mul actually hadn’t been such a brilliant idea. Oh, well, they can’t all be gems, right?

  “So,” he said, coming to the end of his litany of woe, “what can you offer to to compensate?”

  “I still know some things that are going to happen—”

  “Like the Earthtoadess’s seizure?” he asked.

  I said yes.

  “9 Fanged Hummingbird had already named that sun, two tunob ago.”

  Hell. Wasn’t my prediction more accurate? I asked.

  He said yes, and that he’d used it to time the deer hunt to wind down at the right time. What else did I know? he asked. What would happen to the Harpy House after his death?

  I had to say that we didn’t know, but that as far as we could tell, Ix would be abandoned within twenty-five years. Or, at least, much of the irrigated land in the area would return to an uncultivated state, occupational residues and trash deposits would drop to near zero, and there wouldn’t be any further stone buildings or monuments.

  “And what will happen to me after my death, in the next k’atun?” he asked.

  What? Oh, he means his head and skeleton. I said I didn’t know. He didn’t move, and the tone of his voice didn’t change, but somehow you could tell he was losing patience fast. Shouldn’t he already know these things? I wondered. I snuck a glance up at his face and was a little surprised at something I thought I saw. There was something in there behind the poker eyes, something almost maybe feeble, or rather pained, or even despairing. He asked about his intended heir, 17 Jog. As it turned out, this wasn’t his other son but a favorite nephew whom he’d sent away to Oxwitzá, that is, the site in Belize that in the twenty-first century would be called Caracol.

  I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t recall the name turning up on any monuments. This isn’t going well, I thought.

  “And will our descendants suckle us on our lights?” he asked. He meant would they burn offerings to him and his family on their various anniversaries.

  I started to talk about how there was still a generalized respect for the ancestors in what we would call traditional Maya communities, and how they do burn offerings on some of the same festivals, and whatever, but the more I said the less convincing it sounded. As far as specifics went, I started to say, your names—well, frankly, by the end of the next b’ak’tun your name will probably be forgotten even by your own descendants, and your inscriptions, if any, will be covered up for sixty k’atunob’ until they get dusted off and mistranslated by a bunch of PhD’ed grave robbers. “That is, unless I get back,” I said, thinking of what seemed like a clever segue. In fact, I told him, we could even write down all his accomplishments and the history of his whole dynasty, and I could take it back with me and make sure my people made a fuss over him—

  He made an audible intake of breath. It was like saying, “You have our permission to shut up.”

  I did.

  He asked what was going to happen over the remaining 256 lights of this current tun.

  “10 Jade Smoke of K’an Ex will be seated on 4 Raining, 17 Ending,” I said. “He’ll capture 2 Sparkstriker of Lakamha 23 lights after that.” [Note to self: too many confusing names. Go back and explain what the hell is going on. —Jed]

  “And how much smoke does that send my way?” 2JS asked. That is, why should I care?

  “Maybe no smoke,” I said. Damn. I was running out of A material. Maybe I should just the hell ask him about the Game. No, don’t. You’re still on thin quicksand around here.

  “What else?”

  Hell. Come on, JD, think of something. Maybe just make something up. Then at least he won’t have already seen it. Except, no, really, he’s a pretty shrewd character. Don’t try to fool somebody who’s already proven himself to be sharper than you are. Just let him decide you can help out around the house. Okay.

  “I can help Harpy House prevail in any fight,” I said. My Ixian sounded a little stilted, but at least now I was yacking away in it without having to think too much first. “Look in Jed’s memories for weapons.”

  “What weapons?” he asked.

  I describ
ed explosions and said there had to be some in my memories. He seemed to understand. I explained how I could mix up gunpowder in less than twenty days of processing.

  Instead of answering, 2 Jeweled Skull lit a cigar on a rushlight. He put a finger over one nostril and sucked in the smoke through the other.

  “If anyone saw a weapon like that,” he said, “if anyone even heard of it, they’d say we bought it from a scab caster.”